Imagery and the Language of Poetry

By the due date assigned, post your response of one or two paragraphs (at least 150-200 words) to the Discussion Area. To support your comments, your discussion answers should include specific information and quotations from the readings. By the end of Week 1, comment on at least two of your classmates’ submissions. Your replies to classmates should be at least a paragraph in length and made with an eye to expand, clarify, defend, and/or refine their thoughts. Consider asking questions to further meaningful conversation. Be clear and concise, referring to specific ideas and words from your classmates’ postings. Participation must be completed by the end of the first week to earn credit.

Prompt:

• Choose a poem from the assigned readings listed below, and identify some of the key imagery or other kinds of poetic language used in the poem, which you believe are vital to understanding it. Here are some possible approaches:
  • Provide a detailed discussion of how the images function in the poem.
  • Do the images work together to form a coherent pattern?
  • What ideas or feelings are conveyed by the images or figurative language?
  • How do the images contribute to the overall meaning of the poem?
•  Our course eBook (Portable Literature) should be your only source. Do not use outside sources.
• Title your discussion response with the poem’s title. This will help other students see which poems have been discussed. Once a poem has been discussed twice, please do not choose it for analysis.

Read the following poems and choose one to discuss:

• Alvarez, “Dusting”
• Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
• Browning, “How Do I Love Thee”
• Burns, “Oh, My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”
• Cummings, “Buffalo Bill”
• Cummings, “Next to of Course God America I”
• Cummings, “Since Feeling is First”
• Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”
• Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
• Heaney, “Digging”
• Heaney, “Mid-Term Break”
• Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
• Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”
• Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
• Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
• MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
• Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
• McKay, “The White City”
• Pastan, “Ethics”
• Plath, “Daddy”
• Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
• Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham”
• Rich, “Living in Sin”
• Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”
• Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
• Shakespeare, “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds”
• Shakespeare, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun”
• Shakespeare, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”
• Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
• Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”
• Stevens, “The Snow Man”
• Yeats, “The Second Coming”
• Yeats, “When You Are Old”

Tips

Remember to provide evidence for your claims in the form of quoted passages from the poem. Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries should be cited according to APA rules of style, including in-text and reference citations. Quoted material should not exceed 25% of the document.